The Value of Stowing Valuables at Home

“People think of a safe as an ugly, gray box in the basement, but that couldn’t be further from the truth these days,” says Lynel Berryhill of Brown Safe, the California-based manufacturer of luxury safes and vaults. “Modern safes are stylish and they’re the ultimate organizational tool.”

Brown Safe has built safes and walk-in vaults to secure vintage motorcycles, art, wine, sunglasses, a shoe collection and a country’s crown jewels. One client wanted a safe that matched the color of his Lamborghini and requested a special drawer to keep the keys to his large collection of cars. Another wanted a door to match the red of his wife’s BMW.

These home safes typically cost from $2,500 up to six figures, depending on the extent of personalization.

Not surprisingly, safe suppliers and manufacturers do not go into detail about the construction and engineering of models and must keep developing new methods to beat professional thieves.

Robert Tompkin, of the New York-based Prestige Safe, which has been supplying safes since 1894, said people who buy mansions often have hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of jewels and watches to secure. “Safety deposit boxes are dinosaurs, banks are getting rid of them, and people don’t want the inconvenience of having to go to a bank every time they want to wear a piece of jewelry or a watch,” Tompkin said.

The need to keep precious and valuable possessions safe is not new, said engineer Tim Hunkin, who has written a history of safes and the art of safe cracking. The modern safe evolved from wooden, and later iron, medieval chests. Security measures included knives that shot out if someone tampered with the lock.

Richard Krasilovsky, owner of the New York retailer Empire Safe, which has been in business for more than a century, said some customers see safes as objet d’arts, something that they can put on display. Others ask his staff to deliver and install safes in the middle of the night so as few people as possible even know the safes are there.

Berryhill, of Brown Safe, grew up in the safe-making business. She and her two brothers had to crack safes each year to access their Christmas stockings.

“Some of our best days have been opening safes that have survived burglaries as well as fires,” she said. “A few years back we opened a safe for a gentleman who lost his entire estate to the California wildfires and who literally had nothing. We were called out to open the safe and were able to give him perfectly preserved family photos and heirlooms.”

Safe-buying tips:

What size safe should I purchase? Bigger is better. According to safe-suppliers, the most common feedback from customers is that they regret buying safes that are too small to hold all of their valuables.

Where should I place my safe? A safe is often accessed once or twice a day, perhaps for watches or jewelry, so it needs to be in a location where you can use it easily.

What kind of protection should I expect from a safe? Fire is the top concern of most buyers, especially homeowners who live in remote areas. Many safes are engineered to provide protection against both fire and forced entry. Often called composite safes or burglar/fire safes, these models have bodies and doors made of steel to deter break-ins, and inside there is a high-density concrete amalgamate that forms an insulation barrier, also shielding the contents from the effects of fire.

What about quality assurance? Underwriters Laboratories is the pre-eminent, nonprofit testing laboratory in the U.S. that ensures safes perform to a certain standard. They blow them up, drop them, burn them and employ expert safe crackers to assess each model’s performance.

Is a safe a foolproof way to protect my valuables? No safe is completely impenetrable. Given enough time and the right equipment, thieves can open any safe. The purpose is to make it as hard as possible for a burglar so that he either gives up or is caught in the process.

Correction: The first name of Robert Tompkin was incorrectly given as Richard in an earlier version of this article. (June 15, 2015)